Tag Archives: Acer palmatum Trompenberg

Dear friends, I have taken the difficult decision to stop blogging altogether for the foreseeable future. I have many things I’d like to talk about, but I had almost stopped posting because I could barely fit in visiting and commenting on your sites. Now even that is one activity too many in the packed life we live. I shall drop in occasionally on your posts, but make no attempt to keep up or comment. Life is good, and now includes knitting for a new generation. It also includes looking after family, gardening, giving talks, some exercise, a little meditation and, if possible, writing.

I wanted to put up a last post about my Big Garden Works (originally planned for last December), but the builders have not yet finished their part. This is what the garden outside the back door looked like (taken from a window) last August.

This was the planned redesign for this area. The photo below shows where we have got too now. We are waiting for the stone steps and the resin-bound surface on the path. Meanwhile I am digging the old bricks and flints out of the area to be grassed. The turf will be delivered next week and we must lay it within two days. I am enjoying building the path around the little apple tree, but am very frustrated about the endless delays on the work that was going to take ‘three to four weeks’ and started in February. I know it will be finished one day.

I started writing this post, because a violent rainstorm, plus thunder and lightning, sent me indoors, here is a photo, looking towards the house, after the storm

I cannot leave without an appreciation of this little book of poetry. I have slowly fallen in love with The Human Hive by John Looker. It celebrates the work by which we all live now and have lived throughout human history and it does so with beautiful, colourful precision. There is a completeness to the structure of the book which slowly reveals itself as you read and understand the different sections. The writing is moving and yet self-effacing – the least introspective poetry I can remember. A great companion for any occasion and can be slipped into a pocket, read during a sleepless night or a long train journey.

Some of my beloved maples to finish. A three year old seedling that my husband is bonsai-ing.

Trompenberg, that was so badly frosted last year, now in good health again.

I don’t want to be churlish and switch off the comments (even if I knew how), but I’d be perfectly happy if you didn’t comment.

Christopher Lloyd said that all gardens have an unpleasaunce as well as a pleasance – ours has several. In the last couple of months my husband has created order out of chaos and we are unpleasaunce down and several compost bins, new fence and a log shelter up.

The rest of the garden is half way through June as far as I can tell.

… I am being forced to use the new editor as I cannot upload media in the old one… and it is sending me crackers!! I have no idea why these images are different sizes. Here, I hope, is my art-house image of the garden.

This post is really to say a brief goodbye as I tackle the pre-publication launch parties for the new book. Copies were due last week… they will now arrive three days before the first party. I shall be away from my desk for several days. My sanity is hanging by a thread. I am trailing behind with all your posts, so will be doing some leapfrogging. Sorry about the ones I will miss.

A while ago I mentioned that I planned to replace my desk seat (an ancient block of polystyrene) with a Swedish ball. I duly bought one… but I go the size wrong. I’d need to have shorter legs, or a very long body to make this workable. So I thought I would use it for its proper purpose – exercise. I checked out some websites and there were some good moves to be done with a flat piece of wall*. So I walked round our house looking for an appropriate piece of wall. We have a plenty of rooms, but – one of our daughters and several of our friends are artists, my husband is an archivist and historian, I have been collecting books from childhood onwards… I could not find a single large enough area of wall for me and the Swedish ball in the whole house. I am still puzzling over this.

A couple of days ago we met the smallest squirrel in the area on his first day out. He wasn’t entirely sure who to be friends with, what to eat or where to go.

One of my prettiest acer seedlings, the only purple dissectum, got caught by the frost three weeks ago, and has now definitely bitten the dust. I cannot complain as all the others that I transplanted have survived appalling wind and frost (I have been turning the garden into a ghosttown at night with white fleeces every where). The mature maples are now in lovely spring leaf.

Acer palmatum Sengo Kaku

Acer palmatum Trompenburg

Some spring flowers are already going over, but I still love tulips when they grow blowsy,and the Kraken is awaking (see Monster Hosta post).

Hosta Sum and Substance

We have a friend staying and yesterday went to visit Audley End in Essex. I am suffering from greenhouse envy.

*Memo to self try to avoid text with the words ball, wall, movement etc, it is very difficult to keep it clean.

It seems I will never get used to the sight of the new leaves on Japanese maples. Lucky me. Going around and checking the young leaves for black-fly is one of my hopeless antidotes at the moment for my depression over the election results.

Acer palmatum Sango-kaku

Acer palmatum Matsukaze

And biggest excitement of the maple year – a new baby.

Every May there is another excitement – the return of the martins. We were a little apprehensive about their reactions, as we had knocked out two of their three regular nests in order to paint the bargeboards round the house. However they are back and seem to be sharing the one nest while building next door. This is a pair.

If you thought the photos of the martins were poor, try my ‘art house’ video of frogs. Actually, best shut your eyes and listen. It is only 9 seconds. It expresses some of my censored comments at the moment.

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Surviving the Death Railway cover

Border Line: click image to order, or available from Heffers bookshop, Cambridge UK

Border Line eBook cover

Border Line

"Of course love is the ultimate luxury, but I am unwilling to continue in the certainty of its absence."
Grace is searching online for ways to die and she finds Daniel. Like a pied piper, he leads her and nine other people on a trek across Slovenia. For twenty-one days they share stories, play games, surprise themselves with laughter… and make their final decisions.
An intense love story told against the backcloth of the Slovenian landscape. It tackles contentious issues around suicide and assisted dying and yet remains uplifting.

Unseen Unsung: click image to buy

Unseen Unsung

Luca, a brilliant and self-absorbed young opera singer, is buried in the rubble of a collapsed building. A girl crawls through the debris to comfort him and then vanishes. Perhaps she died in the ruins or maybe she is just a figment of his imagination. When he discovers the strange truth, he is unwilling to accept it.
This is a story of love between two people who would never have met and never have found common ground without one of the catastrophes of modern life.
Unseen Unsung celebrates the power of music and the force of human survival in a complex world.

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